Get Washington out of the education business

This week, the Republican Congress will consider the Student Success Act — a modest move away from from the government-centric education reforms that a Republican Congress put into effect in 2001.

There are some good things about this bill, which will serve as the reauthorization of former President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Importantly, the bill removes the Education Department’s ability to bludgeon states into adopting the controversial Common Core standards. The legislative language specifically forbids both direct and indirect attempts “to influence, incentivize, or coerce” states’ decisions.

This is based on real-life events — President Obama has made adoption a condition for states to obtain waivers for currently unworkable provisions of the original No Child Left Behind law.

The Student Success Act is therefore a step in the right direction, because it returns educational decisions to their rightful place — the state (or local) level. It is also positive in that it eliminates nearly 70 Department of Education programs, replacing them with more flexible grants to the states.

But as a vehicle for moving the federal government away from micromanaging schools that should fall entirely under state and local control, the bill is disappointing. As the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke notes, the recent explosion of federal spending and federal control in education over the last few decades has failed to produce any significant improvement in outcomes. Reading and math proficiency have hardly budged.

Despite this, the federal government’s still-modest financial contribution to primary and secondary education has come with strings that give Washington an inordinate say over state education policy. This applies in states that fund education well and in states that fund it poorly.

The Student Success Act does well to loosen or cut some of the federal strings, but it leaves federal spending on primary and secondary education at the elevated levels of the Bush era. It also fails to provide states with an opt-out.

Conservatives remember well what happened the last time Republicans seized control of the House, Senate and White House. Their first priority — and it was in fact designated H.R. 1 by the House in 2001 — was the original No Child Left Behind law. This wasn’t the first such failure of GOP nerve — even President Ronald Reagan was dissuaded from his stated desire to abolish the Department of Education just a few years after its creation.

As with other endeavors, governance should be evidence-based. Education is one area where the federal government has long resisted accepting the evidence or heeding its constitutional limitations. For all the rhetoric of returning education policy to the states, Republicans should be looking forward to a post-Obama opportunity to do it for real — to end federal experimentation and meddling in primary and secondary education and letting states set their own policies.

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